Post: Another day, another brain-dump
So, again it seems to have been a week since my last post. A few things that have interested me in the past week:
- Sealing one of the final nails in the coffin of my student life, the Computing Service at Cambridge University have discontinued my e-mail account. dhwt2@cam.ac.uk is no more (hence no need to bother obfuscating it from spam-crawlers).
- I have a shiny new Nokia 6680. I haven’t really had time to get entirely used to it yet, but the review so far: it’s rather nice.
- O2 (a phone network, for those of you not familiar with them) are thoroughly unpleasant characters: if anyone has caught their recent advertising about how they are now really nice and friendly to their existing customers rather than screwing them over in favour of grabbing new customers, don’t believe it for a second. I don’t want to turn this post into a rant but suffice to say that, unless they offer a significantly better deal than anyone else, I suggest you avoid them like the plague.
- Progress on the site redesign goes very slowly, to the point of not really going at all: I’m still reading through Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards though, so I can at least claim to be being semi-productive about the whole thing.
- You may or may not have caught the Engadget article regarding Microsoft’s introduction into Longhorn of OPM, another DRM technology to encrypt high-definition video data, potentially right to the monitor. In the event of the user’s monitor not supporting this technology, they either get a horribly low-resolution version or simply a black screen. The arguments against this kind of technology have been iterated a thousand times, so I won’t repeat them here: just take any pre-existing list and mentally add “spending a few hundred pounds on a new monitor” and you’ve about got the picture. The scariest thing is that so few people know that their rights are being swept out from under them.
- With the main job application I made having been unsuccessful, I’ve decided to go off on holiday instead: America is the main destination, with options on New Zealand and anywhere else which may take my fancy. Current American cities which take my fancy are Washington, New York, Princeton and potentially Cambridge. Any more suggestions?
Well, that’s about it for this week: I shall try to post more regularly over the next couple of months, but time does seem to have a tendency to fly by awfully fast…
Boston
LA, San Francisco. Oh and Austin is brilliant, but if you’re SXSWing next year then prob no real need to go there now already.
PS As for O2, did you harass them about a discount? They’ve offered me one, but I think I prefer the upgraded version of my current phone, to be honest….
I didn’t harass O2 about a discount, no: from my experience with O2 customer services, few of them have either the authority or the brain cells to offer me anything. I just worked around the problem in the obvious way to get the new-customer perks.
The O2 bosses aren’t thinking squat about their contract customers. The O2 advert’s talking about the introduction of their (slightly messed up) rewards scheme for pay-as-you-go customers, whereby they give you 10% of the amount of money you top up by per quarter back for free. Which sounds nice and it is, but the part they don’t tell you is that you have to apply to join the scheme (even though it’s completely free and at no cost to you). Then every quarter, instead of updating your balance automatically, they send you a text message telling you how much they’re going to give you back, and you have to then send them a message saying “yes, I want free money, please give it to me”. Like, duh! Of course I won’t say no to free credit, why are you even bothering to ask?!
I think the company’s resident executive’s theory is “well, we’re going to make it sound like we’re rewarding them, but if we make it as complicated as possible then half of our customer base won’t be assed to do it and we won’t lose as much money. Yes yes great idea! Oh, and while we’re talking about money I’m having a 200% raise in my wage. All those in favour say ‘aie’… right, that’s that sorted then, snap fingers Secretary minion, can you tell the valet to have my car ready in 15 minuites and check the details on my hotel reservation? Excellent.”
That does indeed sound like they’re trying to make it sufficiently difficult that people just give up: like most of O2’s business practices it seems to be one which makes economic sense (“We get more customers without having to reduce our profits”) but is really underhanded and generally evil. The contract one goes by a similar principle (“Let’s put up the prices for our existing customers, but make sure it just falls short of the amount of hassle they’d go through to switch to another network”): again, makes economic sense, at least in the short term, but is kinda Machiavellian.
Are other phone companies quite this bad?